In the past, photo albums and picture books were the product of a labor-intensive series of manual manipulations of physical objects: a photographer would capture images onto film; the film would be developed to produce negatives; the negatives would be printed onto paper; and the paper photos would be arranged onto a page for delivery or for further operations leading to printing (e.g., offset printing) of multiple copies of the page. The process would often include cropping or resizing of photos to obtain an attractive, balanced composition, and for low-volume production, layout often involved cropping or resizing to match pre-cut windows in a mat board (rather than cutting custom mats to suit an arbitrary layout of ideally-cropped and -sized images on the page). Thus, in addition to the involved manual process, the result was often constrained by the number and configuration of pre-cut mats: a designer laying out three images on a page might have only two or three different options for photo position, size and aspect ratio. (The alternative of cutting arbitrary custom mats for each page is prohibitively expensive for many projects.)
With the development of digital photography and high-bandwidth data connections among devices (such as via the Internet), photos are now more commonly shared one at a time or in an array or slide show on a transient display device such as a multi-pixel screen (e.g., an LCD monitor, a laptop screen, a tablet device or an electronic picture frame), and/or via other impermanent distribution mechanisms such as website galleries. However, consumers still desire permanent physical copies of some photo sets, such as wedding albums, graduation pictures and childhood memories books. And although many of the photos in such physical albums are often created through a digital process, the facilities for laying out the photos into printable spreads still emulate the traditional “template” model, where the designer must select from among a small number of arrangements and photo sizes matching the number of photos to be displayed on the page. (Or alternatively, the creator of the photo layout software must produce an enormous number of templates with different layouts, sizes and aspect ratios for each number of photos on a page, and the designer must be familiar with the many templates to achieve the desired effect.) Either way, simply replicating traditional paper-based photo layout procedures into software does not take advantage of the flexibility and power that computer-based layout could offer, and does not yield the labor (and cost) savings that might be expected.
An automated, parametric photo layout method can offer significant advantages over traditional paper-based procedures and over software procedures that merely mimic the traditional methods.